Sunday, November 10, 2013

Wire presents Drill: Seattle at Barboza, The Crocodile & Neumos: Nov 21 - 23


The third week of November brings three nights of post-Punk legends, Wire as hosts of their very own marathon Drill: Seattle. Enlisting contributing performers for their 'Pinkflag Orchestra' and opening acts as Earth, Helmet and Chastity Belt, this is going to be a thrilling recreation of some of the highlights from their Drill: London of last year, including a night of the aforementioned Pinkflag Guitar Orchestra, the collaborative realization of their album "The Drill" and Wire's secret 'unannounced' opening bill for another undisclosed band. The venue/theme  lineup looking something like THURSDAY at Barboza: Earth, Pillar Point, Wire/Drill. FRIDAY at The Crocodile: Helmet, By Sunlight, FF. SATURDAY at Neumos: Chastity Belt, Vestals, Wire/Pinkflag Orchestra. Any one of these evenings having the potential to do some legendary rocking, particularly Thursday and Saturday's realizations! For as much as groundbreaking work like 1977's "Pink Flag" and 1978's "Chairs Missing" are three decades removed, Wire continued to both innovate, warp, mutate and play with pop music's parameter's, creating through the 80's and 90's unclassifiable post-Punk/electronic fusions like "154" and such striking achievements as my own personal (absolutely unprepared for) introduction to their sound, 1987's "The Ideal Copy" and the gorgeously lush orchestrations of "A Bell is a Cup". To then later move into early IDM pop fusions as WIR with "The First Letter" and it's companion the "So and Slow It Grows" EP featuring collaborations with LFO and the Orb, all the way back around to the present day, as a rocking trio on albums like the 2001 - 2007 "Read & Burn" series. Rounding out their massive, influential corpus are abundant solo works, some of which the pinnacle of the whole discography, Bruce Gilbert's brilliant "Music for Fruit" comes to mind, as does the DaDa inspired experimental pop-Concrete of Dome's "1-2" & "3-4". Theirs is a legacy that's beyond quantification. It's safe to say there'd be no opening of the floodgates of music's mathy post-Rock revolution like we saw in the 90's without them. And that's the least of their achievements!